EcoChic Design Award Launches Global Search to Reduce Textile Waste

The EcoChic Design Award isn’t your average sustainable-fashion design competition. Now in its third year, the annual competition reflects a deeper battle to stem the fashion industry’s production of textile waste. The 2013 challenge is shaping up a little differently from previous iterations. Although the manufacturing hubs of Hong Kong and mainland China will continue to be its focus—the region produces as much as 20 million tons of pre- and post-consumer textile waste every year—the EcoChic Design Award is expanding its search to include designers from Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany.

The competition addresses the belief that fashion designers can influence an estimated 80-90 percent of the environmental and economic impact of a product, according to Graedel et al 1995. With this in mind it is not rocket science, to me at least, that educating fashion designers is an important step towards making the fashion industry, one of the world’s most polluting industries, more sustainable.

The EcoChic Design Award 2013 is a sustainable fashion design competition for emerging fashion designers with less than three years’ industry experience living in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK, France, Belgium and Germany. As I write from Shanghai, designers around the eight regions are pouring over our online sustainable fashion tutorials, exploring our new learning platform, and drilling deeper into their sketchbooks to meet our fast approaching application deadline on 15 August 2013.

The EcoChic organizing committee has put together some powerful prizes to reward the best.

The first prize, The EcoChic Design Award 2013 in partnership with Esprit, is to design a recycled textile clothing collection for Esprit for their global retail.

The second prize, The EcoChic Design Award 2013 in partnership with John Hardy, is to go on an educational trip to learn first-hand how John Hardy integrates environmental and social sustainability into the core of their design, production and business philosophies.

Finally, the special prize, The EcoChic Design Award 2013 is to design a sustainable outfit for singer Sandy Lam to wear in a feature for Hong Kong Elle.

In addition, all of our semi-finalists will receive a career-boosting educational package.

Competitors will be assessed by a local judging panel in each of the eight regions who will select three semi-finalists from their particular region. The resulting 24 semi-finalists will then be reduced to eight finalists, one representing each region, by our influential international judging panel. The eight talented finalists will unite in Hong Kong for a two-day seminar and present their sustainable collections at Hong Kong Fashion Week in January 2014 under the media’s intense media spotlight.